


the shortest distance between two points

by tritonreverse



Series: you know what that is? growth [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, more like pre-michelle jones/peter parker?, or something like that, the internal dialogue of an existential crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-27 05:58:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18732988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tritonreverse/pseuds/tritonreverse
Summary: Spoilers for Avengers: Endgame.swiftly mrs. who brought her hands, still holding the skirt, together





	the shortest distance between two points

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Avengers: Endgame. Yes, the spoiler period is pretty much up today, but it's a common courtesy, don't you think?

One day, Michelle Jones was sitting in physics, staring at the chair where Peter Parker should be, and then she blinked, and she was sitting on her bed, but her bedroom was covered in dust, and her phone was dead, and she felt so unbelievably wrong, like she was at the top of a roller coaster, staring down at an impossible angle towards what she hoped would be a a curve back up but might also just be an eternity of falling. Then she blinked again, and things settled into place, and somehow she...knew, knew? that this wasn’t the same time as when she was sitting in physics, staring at a Peter Parker shaped hole in the air.

She forced her way to a standing position, some hind part of her brain fighting her on that, but couldn’t move beyond that. _This must have been how Steve Rogers felt,_ she thought, _when he woke up after they pulled him from the ice._ Suddenly, MJ was glad she’d made a point to read as many of the files that Natasha Romanoff had dumped on the internet as possible, despite her parents’ _(honestly, legitimate)_ concerns about their appropriateness for a young teenager. That at least gave her a point of reference, the knowledge that Steven Rogers had been frozen, had been pulled out of the ice, a man out of time. How she knew she wasn’t just coming out of some weird fugue state after passing out from, who knew, maybe an unauthorized freshman chem lab experiment she couldn’t explain. How long would it take a room to collect that kind of dust layer? She ran a finger over the top of her clock, trying to pull some bit of trivia or acadec leaning out of her head, something about archaeology or germs or something, but nothing came.

The clock itself was still plugged in, and read **3:02 PM** , blinking lazily as proof of function. Neither of her parents would be home yet, then, hence the silence of the apartment, though though she could hear so many noises of other apartments through the walls. MJ suddenly felt like an idiot for just standing in the middle of her room, and opened the door. The disorientation she’d just been getting over instantly returned. _Man, you really don’t notice some things until they change_ , she thought. If you’d paid her $100 to draw the exact layout of her living room, she maybe could have gotten through couch, chairs, tv, but never all the little bits and pieces. Now though, every moved piece felt glaring, and just more confirmation that something had gone horribly weird.

She grabbed for the remote, a remote for a new TV on a coffee table that had used to be at the foot of her parents’ bed and fumbled for the power button. Just before she hit it, something stopped her. _(Why was she looking at the TV when she could just pull up a calendar on the computer, which would give her the date without, you know, other, well, freaking her out any further?)_

It ended up being neither the TV nor the computer that told her how much time had passed. It was the SPCA calendar magneted to the fridge that stopped her short before she’d so much as touched the keyboard. When she went to school that morning, tossing a casual “see you later” behind her as she grabbed her backpack and MetroCard on her way out the door, it had read 2018.

 

Now it read 2023.

 

MJ sat down heavily on the floor of the kitchen, staring up at the numbers in bold underneath a basket of overly adorable puppies. 2023. She’d gone to school, blinked, and was five years in the future. She was supposed to be in college, now, ideally most of the way through her degree so she could get out to helping the world. _(She was supposed to have worked up the courage to have kissed Peter Parker, see if she liked it.)_ She felt like Meg Wallace, or Dana Franklin, or the Connecticut Yankee. _(Was she going to, like, fade out again, blink and be back in 2018? What had happened to her cactus, did anyone remember to check on it?)_

She almost went back into her _(f_ _ive years of dust? really?)_ room to check on Benedict the cactus but something pulled her back up and towards the computer. Surely she wasn’t the only one who - or maybe she was. Maybe this was her superpower, since apparently kids at Midtown got those now, _Parker_. She almost instinctually clicked on Tumblr, but common sense ruled and the memes of the future could wait.

She pulled up _nytimes.com,_ and though she’d braced herself for whatever headline popped up, she still gasped a bit at the giant letters filling the screen.

**_The Vanished Return._ **

Well, that answered that. It wasn’t just her _(which was honestly a little bit reassuring, because at least there’d be other people trying to figure out how to live their 2018 life in 2023?)_ and her brain spun out a bit there. Was Peter...vanished? Was Betty or Ned or Abe or Mya from Tumblr or En from Twitter or Mr. Delmar’s bodega cat or Mr. Delmar? Had people lost their partners, and then their hope, and then those partners were now coming back to a strange new world? Where were her parents? _(Still at work. Still at work, right? The calendar was current so someone was living here and her room was the same and the pictures on the wall were of her, grouped in a new way, the way you’d honor your, oh God, your daughter you thought was dead for five years)_.

A clock, a new one, one MJ’d never heard before, rang out the half-hour. If there were more people than just her...coming back _(how odd, to come back when you hadn’t even known you left)_ then surely the trains and roads would be jammed full of people trying to see if those they’d lost had reappeared. Surely her parents would be on their way, to be home for her.

She plugged her phone in, willing herself to not even think about the consequences of it apparently traveling forward in time with her. Assuming her number still worked, maybe she could, maybe someone would? It was a moot point for now, though, because it apparently had reached that state of deadness where it took a good 20-minute charge to get it to the point that it would wake up.

The couch was now positioned with its back to the front door, and she sank down in her favorite position, sprawled out across the floor propped against its back. _It was so weird_ , she thought from somewhere in her rational brain, _to be thinking about something like that almost as something she...used to like? It was exactly like A Wrinkle in Time. Someone had folded the fabric beneath her feet and she’d walked blindly across, between one moment and the next, basically between breaths._ She looked at her nails. For her, it had been just a few hours ago that she’d broken the thumbnail trying to break into Parker’s locked chem table drawer, but now it was a five-year-old break. Her hands looked the same, her Converse no dirtier, her angry tee-shirt no less angry _(but was it even applicable anymore? Wait, it was a eff the patriarchy shirt, it was always applicable)_.

The clock had just ticked over to 4:00 pm when the door flew open in front of her. Her mother, more greys in her hair, lines on her face that MJ did not know, stood there, the look on her face somewhere between fear and hope. MJ could do nothing but stand there in the hallway, four feet and five years away, watching that fear and hope melt into something far more complex before her mother was collapsing into her arms, crossing time and space in a straight line.

**Author's Note:**

> I keep thinking to myself “hey, self, try writing from May’s voice, or Peter’s, or about a different fandom,” and then I end up writing more MJ. Specifically, I know we’ll likely either get in-universe or Word of God pronouncements about what it was like for all those people, popping back into existence in a world that might have moved on from them, how it felt, and MJ and her (for me, at least) constant inner dialogue seemed the perfect fit to explore this. 
> 
> Sure, the stones make it as if the snap...didn’t happen, at least for the people who got snapped, and we see all the warriors coming through the portals as fresh as ever, ready to fight, but what...what about people without powers or magic or training, who just come back into being? Did Bruce put some thought into “have them come back somewhere they’ll be safe?” Reunite families, rescue those in planes or in buildings that might not exist anymore? I’d like to think he did, but...what happens when part of a family ceased to exist and then returns, of but not in their time?


End file.
